


A Single Shot

by Houseofyork2018



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Bittersweet Ending, Depression, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:53:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23558668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Houseofyork2018/pseuds/Houseofyork2018
Summary: Life in roaring colour when you're stuck in black and white.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Natasha Romanov, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	A Single Shot

You wake up to a shrill alarm. There's nothing new about today. Still the same choking blackness that engulfs you the second you awake. Like sleep but worse. Because the darkness of sleep comes with the chance of nothingness or at best a dream of a happier time. A time before everything went wrong.

You get up, wash, dress, go to work. The best part in some ways is the way your fooling everyone. Fooling the people you see. They don’t know how you long to not exist. It’s like the biggest joke in the universe and you're the only one laughing. They don’t know that the only thing stopping you is letting people down. Your landlord would have to re-let your apartment which is so much harder when there’s been a suicide. And someone would have to deal with the body. You don’t wish that on anyone. But you can’t help feeling like this wasn’t the way your life was supposed to pan out. Like maybe somewhere in the universe there’s a save file that you can reset to before it all went to shit.

For that you’d have to know when it all went to shit. And a spotty memory doesn’t help. You don’t remember a goddamn thing before you woke up in this fucking apartment 4 years ago. Nothing but a file and a post it note to tell you it was common to have memory gaps. That you’re name was Jim Barnes. You were a admin tech for SHEILD. It listed the address. It was obviously worn. Everyone knew you. Memory loss was obviously a thing that was common with you, but it had been 4 years since that episode. And gradually you became worse, more alienated, more lost, like you were searching for someone around a corner, someone just out of sight.

Year 3 was the worst. You’d abandoned your apartment in DC with the pretty, sad eyed nurse who lived next door, and driven to New York. Spent 3 days trawling the streets of Brooklyn before you'd given up and gone home and cried about not finding something you didn’t even know existed. A thing you weren’t even sure of but you knew in your bones was missing. As if you checked enough back alleys you’d find waiting.

You finish work, grab a wrap at your usual corner deli and go home. Eat it on the way. Return to an empty apartment. Empty except for the bottles of vodka you bought 3 weeks ago. 4 beautiful liters of burning clarity. Mother’s courage a voice in the back of your head supplies. It summons bird bones, blonde hair fine as silk and eyes of the bluest summer skies shot with a spike of green field. Never a whole face. If anything this is the thing that girds your loins. Gives you the steel to finally take a full drink. It’s been two years since your last. Since you realised you were either a long term alcoholic or had an exceptional metabolism. That it took downing 1 liter and then a steady stream to get you to the point of courage you needed. Natalie wouldn’t be around to stop you today. You signed her New York transfer papers yourself this morning.

By bottle 3’s dregs your feeling hollow but brave. Number 4 and you take a walk to the roof. Clint, the buildings handy man, had moved to New York the week before, claimed he managed to buy a building in Bed Sty. Offered you an apartment. You’d said no and shut the door. You didn’t care about the way Brooklyn called your soul, called you as if home, your goddamn birth certificate said Shelbyville, Indiana and when you’d asked Natalie if you’d ever lived in Brooklyn she’d said not as long as she’d known you, and she’d known you since she was 10 years old. There was at most 5 years between you so you figured she was the closet thing to family you’d had even if you couldn’t remember her beyond that day in 2008 when you woke up to DC in mourning for Alexander Pierce and the knowledge that a terrorist cult called HYDRA had tried to launch a bunch of fucking death machines into the air and her on your doorstep half an hour after finding that fucking worn file.

Natalie might be sad if you jumped right now. She's the one who told you about your mom, widowed young, and your sister Becca. When you think of her you just get a hazy image of nut brown braids and a peel of laughter, pure as a church bell. Both died a long time ago apparently, except that doesn’t fit with your one clear memory of the both, crying at a train station, begging you to come back. But maybe its a dream. Even Nat says that to have been in WW2 you’d need to be nearly 84. it stupid,

Bottle 4 is nearly gone and the sun is just beginning to kiss the horizon. You’ve moped to long and your hard won confidence is waning.  
Downing the rest, knowing it won’t help but also knowing it won’t do any good to have it hanging around. You used to drink brandy of all things if you were drinking for pleasure. Whiskey at the end of the week, beer for fun, vodka when you were cold. You’re always cold. Never more so than on the 4th of July. So Vodka is what you drink now. Everything before the cold is a sepia photograph. You don’t understand why you feel like a coloured photograph is modern. Just another tick box on the list of reasons you don’t fit in. 

Collapsing on your couch you switch on the TV. Every channel you switch to says the same thing. Captain America LIVES. You shrug and smile. Wow. Who’d have thought that? Guy gets preserved in ice. Bet it was cold. 

The buzz was fading. Not the way he knew a hangover should creep in, in the cold of a rickety apartment with a disappointed blue gaze upon him at the kitchen table. Their kitchen table. But in a way that he knew if he didn’t grab M1911 soon then it would be another futile attempt, the damn thing was notorious for jamming at the last minute but it felt unfamiliar and that made it feel right. Captain America was making a speech. It resonated in a part of his heart even with the volume on mute, wondered what that voice would have triggered if it hadn’t been muted. It was almost as if a part of his broken soul was calling out. 

He downed the dregs of the 4th bottle, put the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger just as his door unlocked to Nat, the only other person who had a key.

His last thought in this world was how stricken she looked, like he’d failed her in a whole new way he didn’t even know he could. 

Then you walked through a door that had seen better days, was greeted by a voice calling it’s location from the bedroom and finally Bucky sighed. Home.


End file.
